Research Reports

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Overview

The NRCCTE’s research focuses on issues of urgency to both the field of CTE and the nation’s higher education system, recovering economy, and evolving labor market, addressing such topics as programs of study (POS)/career pathways, curriculum integration of CTE and academic content knowledge and skills, postsecondary student retention and completion, and professional development for educators in the areas of data use for program improvement and support for alternatively certified CTE educators.

Research Reports

This final report offers findings from a four-year longitudinal field study of 6,638 students in three large urban school districts in three states. Researchers Marisa Castellano, Kirsten E. Sundell, Laura T. Overman, George B. Richardson, and James R. Stone III followed students from the Class of 2012 from their ninth-grade year through high school graduation. Students in the intervention group were enrolled in programs of study/career pathways, many offered as wall-to-wall career academies in subject areas ranging from the health sciences, engineering technology, and alternative fuels to automotive technology, business and marketing, and culinary and hospitality. Students in the comparison group attended regular comprehensive high schools.

This report contains the findings of the Oregon Applied Academics research and development project which spanned three academic years from 2010 through 2013. The overall purpose of the project was to develop and implement a technical math course that would meet graduation requirements and improve student performance.

This study examined the relationship of community college programs and services to retention of students in four community colleges, with an emphasis on determining whether outcomes vary for students in occupational programs and how student characteristics moderate these effects, with the goal of determining what is correlated with success.

This is the final technical report from the NRCCTE's five-year longitudinal study of South Carolina's Personal Pathway to Success initiative, which was authorized by the state's Education and Economic Development Act (EEDA) in 2005. NRCCTE-affiliated researchers at the National Dropout Prevention Center at Clemson University investigated the extent to which EEDA facilitated the creation of programs of study/career pathways and whether these programs led to improved student high school and postgraduation preparation and planning. The study followed two student cohorts from a sample of eight high schools from economically and culturally diverse regions of the state.

This report presents the final results of a mixed-method longitudinal study that used a backward-mapping approach to examine mature, POS-like programs at three community colleges and their feeder high schools across the country. This study is part of the NRCCTE's portfolio of groundbreaking longitudinal research on POS in the United States.